I wasn’t alive then. But the cliched image of that time is hippies with long hair and beards, unwashed, riding around in VW buses, bell bottoms, bra burning etc.
But from what I can tell from looking at my relatives yearbooks,clips on TV,videos of bands, news clips, the dirtiest of the “dirty hippie” era was the early 70’s, not the 60’s. That style was maybe the tail end of the 60’s. 68-69.
Of course, the counterculture has roots all the way back to the 50’s. Beatniks and all. But from what I can tell, the 60’s didn’t look like the way people who weren’t alive then imagine them to. It appears to me the 60’s were more Mad Men than Woodstock.
You are right. We were much more mental in the '70s.
(Did you mean “metal”? If so, you are still right. Indeed, that did not become really cliched, and did not acquire its current name, until quite well into the '70s. Its precursor in the '60s and early '70s was “progressive blues”.)
I agree with your assessment. “The Sixties” run from maybe 1967 (to be generous) through the mid-70’s. I find this sort of labeling of decades to be misleading at best. It’s rare that social events fall on the decade markers, and more often they’re either way less than 10 years in length, or way more.
A similar notion applies to “age group” as I see it. I like the idea that my “age group” runs from those kids who were seniors when I was a freshman to the ones who were freshmen when I was a senior. That’s the people I would have seen as a peer group and would have related to more than others.
The recent few decades seem to be exceptions, though. It may be too early to tell but the recent Arab revolutions and binLaden’s death seem to have launched us into another era, so 2001-2011 was one long age. 1991-2001 was the post-cold war, pre-terrorism, Internet boom age (although for most people the Internet didnt have much presence before 1995). And the 80s, at the most restrictive, lasted from 1982-1989. I myself would expand that to 1982-1991, for almost a full 10 years. But when you get to the 70s, 60s, and 50s, that concept falls entirely apart (the 70s and 60s being very short and the 60s not even overlapping said chronological decade, the 50s being VERY long.)
I have a similar opinion about music. If a given song or album has only 3 years difference in age versus another, it will generally still seem to fit in the same “age group”. But once you get up to 4 or 5 years difference, most songs will not seem to be of the same time to me. They might have the exact same sound, feel, and culture, but just will feel out of place just because of the time they came out.
While what you’re talking about probably peaked in the early 70’s, it started in the 60’s and not just at the tail end. In the early to mid 60’s, the Beatles got the ball rolling with long hair followed by marijuana use (Rubber Soul, their “pot album,” came out in 1965). The Summer of Love was a significant milestone in 1967, and it didn’t just spring up out of nothing.
It also depends a lot on what you’re using as cultural markers. I have seen the '60’s described as beginning with the assassination of JFK (1963) and ending with Nixon’s resignation (1974). But that’s taking a more political approach (and bringing in those aspects of counterculture that were specifically political in nature, such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War protests, etc.). Although the “hippie, sex, drugs” aspect of the '60’s didn’t start until very late in the decade, its defining moment really was the 1967 Summer of Love, which attached itself pretty strongly to the idea of '60’s. OTOH, when I think of the '70’s, it’s more about Jimmy Carter, “malaise”, oil, and really bad fashion. But as others have pointed out, cultural changes almost never fit into neat ten-year periods.
I spent 67, the Summer of Love, in San Francisco, and I remember it! I was pushing 5. We had hippies in the Haight Ashbury and all the ‘dults were yappin’ about it. My Uncle was convinced that The Beatles were the cause of everything going wrong with the world. He’ll be 97 on Monday.
I think eras in the US correlate better with Presidential terms of office than strict decades. For example, Johnson and Nixon’s term epitomized the 60’s cliche. Ford and Carter were definately a product of the 70’s, Reagan and Bush the 80’s, Clinton the 90’s.
I don’t remember much of the 60’s (which seems to be a recurring theme, but I didn’t even start school until 1968), I can tell you 1972 was very different than 1979.
The 60’s started in late 63 with the assasination of JFK and the arrival of the Beatles in the US. The 60s didn’t end until 74 with Nixon’s resignation. Vietnam was the factor that tied the political and cultural upheaval together.
The image of hippies was a popularized notion. There were plenty of cultural changes related to free expression. The changes readily assumed by the young and carefree gradually migrated throughout the culture. Mad Men is just as much a caraciture of the white collar middle class as the image of hippies was of the young adults, and Happy Days is as an image of the 50s. We tend to remember the changes and differences.
But I just read “The Last Man on the Moon”, by astronaut Gene Cernan. In it, he mentions the cultural divide shaping up during the sixties several times.
The Monkees TV sitcom was in the 60’s, for example. So there was a little bit of this counter-culture going on. (Enough for someone to try to market to it.)
Bell bottom pants (or flares, if not so wide) were biggest (literally) in the mid 70s. I have family pictures with us guys wearing flared pants, Christmas '82.
I think it also took a lot longer for fashion and sociological trends to move from the coasts to the heartland than it does now. Hippies were common in San Francisco in 1967, but Omaha, well, not so much.
And that’s the problem with timing. Certain elements of hippie culture like long hair and beards, big Afros on black guys, casual drug use (especially marijuana and cocaine), casual sex, loud clothing with bright colors and flowers, and a desire to be “hip” and “relevant” leached into the general culture and lingered there, like a dead skunk, all through the 1970’s.
So the 1970’s, no matter where you were, looked and sounded like a watered-down, mass-market hippie love-in. Whereas the 1960’s, unless you really were a hippie, looked like Leave It to Beaver.
